With the proliferation of portable electronic devices today, users are managing and handling a lot of their daily tasks with their electronic devices. For example, users read news, communicate with others (e.g. via electronic mail), take photographs, play games, and watch movies using their portable electronic devices. While there are many different types and brands of electronic devices, these devices share some things in common, one of which is a rectangular display capable of accommodating the standard aspect ratios.
Some of the portable devices include a gyroscope and/or an accelerometer such that the screen content being displayed can be adjusted to the orientation that is desired by the user. Given the rectangular shape of the display, the orientations usually include a portrait mode in which the vertical dimension is greater than the horizontal dimension, or a landscape mode in which the horizontal dimension is greater than the vertical dimension. The incorporation of a gyroscope in the device allows the screen content to adjust automatically between portrait and landscape mode without explicit instruction from the user, simply based on which way the device is being held.
While the automatic adjustment of the screen content according to the device orientation is convenient for users in many situations, it can pose a challenge to content creators. In a traditional medium such as paper, where content was printed with the paper orientation fixed, the content creator could lay out the elements of the page in a way that works best for a particular orientation (e.g., portrait) without having to worry about what the page would look like if it were presented in a different orientation (e.g., landscape). For those creating content to be displayed on an electronic device, they have to make sure that the content that is displayed maintains the general spirit/objective of the creator in either orientation.